Now now... it is a nerf yes, but not a huge one.

I believe the intention of Blizzard is that ArP and Haste and possibly Crit are all additional stats and we gem for Agi/AP (much like DPS casters gem for SP). They don't want us to run from ArP, just not gem for it. And I'm not even certain that this will be enough to stop it.
As mentioned the ToC gear is crampacked with ArP overall. That might very well make up for the deficiency easily. I wouldn't be very worried that this will crush our DPS or make a major impact right away.

What I'm wondering though, wasn't ArP only increased for the melee? Or was that just Haste?

I just recently joined a more elite raiding guild, and have been asked to respec to Marks from Survival. is the 7-57-7 build still the prefered DPS spec? and also I know nothing about all this stacking and nerfing of Armor Pen, Should i gem for it or not so much? i'm a new sheep to the ways of the Marksman. could someone please shed some light on the situation or point me in the right direction?

Keep in mind that we've yet to see the Icecrown gear yet, and Marksman hunters were already hitting the 100% mark on ArPen. It's more likely a move they made so they could create a meaningful stat distribution on tier 10 and the likes.

EDIT: The ArPen nerf is not as hard as it looks, just that you won't reach the 100% armor ignore cap (proc included) just yet. By my napkin math (key word is napkin, though - better wait for a spreadsheet), you'd still be at around 80-95% if you design around the 2 piece t8 2 piece t9 bonus and pick ArPen stuff without sacrificing ilevels.

2-piece T8 + 2-piece T9 is really just an interim step. As good as the ilvl 245/258 gear is, you aren't going to keep any two pieces of T8 for long. I already have ToC replacements for shoulders/gloves/legs, so I'm breaking my T8 2-piece as soon as I get both a helm and chest. If I replace my T8 chest with the T9.245 chest, my DPS only drops by single digits...that would be immediately offset by a helm upgrade.

I agree with you on this being nothing more than an interim step, but I figured it's probably the easier short term path in soupjay's particular case, seeing as there's really need for one more tier 9 piece for the whole setup right now.

so what you're saying is really not to worry about ArPen too much right now because all of the T9 gear basically has it covered? gemming agility would safe route to awesome dps? Also could someone point me in the direction of a good shot priority/rotation for MM? i'm sure its been talked about but i'm not sure where in the 86 pages of this thread.

I dont think that you would avoid gear with ArP in the slightest. Even with the nerf its still ArP>Haste and most of the gear thats out there is like hit/crit/arp or Crit/haste/ArP and Crit/haste/hit and if ur hit caped you would want gear with ArP because its still a better stat that haste

Time go to back to Survival I guess. I mean it's hard enough to make any real headway against Survival as it is (even on tank&spank encounters, especially if they're just short of 3 minutes as they all too often seem to be) and this change is certainly going to hurt MM more than Survival. The whole premise of "certain specs benefiting too much from ArPen and being rewarded too much for stacking it" is pretty much bullshit when it comes to hunters; ArPen is what enabled MM hunters to come into their own, and that seems more or less destroyed now (yeah you can probably make the difference up with future gear, but Survival hunters won't have to).

This smacks of Chicken Little-esque fear mongering. I switched to MM the day Ulduar came out...with less than 100 ArP I still kept pace.

Yes, there a fights where Survival is superior. Vezax hard since Explosive accounts for way more damage than Arcane+Chimera, Yogg P3 due to timing issues, etc., but it's not the end of the world that MM is getting brought back down to Earth. Doing >10K DPS (or about 1500 dps more than second place) on IC hardmode with no shenanigans is unfair/wrong. All this with a much simpler rotation than Survival.

1) We don't need to babysit Serpent Sting
2) We don't have Black Arrow to worry about
3) We don't need to watch for LnL procs
4) Arcane still won't be used except on the move

There was a point where I stacked ArP in every available slot, but just last week I discarded my last ArP gem. I realize I have a Runestone, so it makes life easier for me, but there are other reasons. People in equivalent gear are figuratively putting all their eggs in one basket. Unbuffed I'm sitting at ~49% crit now because I gem agility and am free to put agility/crit in yellow sockets to activate worthwhile socket bonuses. Meanwhile those who stack ArP are sitting around 43% crit and down about 300 AP in similar gear. Agility is more versatile in the way it buffs your dps...and sometimes versatility is more important than squeezing every last bit of DPS out of the spreadsheet.

^This applies to more choices than ArP vs agility. It's why I sometimes put Shifting Dreadstones in blue sockets...for those times where you dip to 1% HP. It's why I run either Cat's Swiftness or Tuskarr's on my boots when Icewalker or 16 agility would clearly result in superior spreadsheet DPS. A talent like Readiness is an intangible on many fights such as Anub'arak Heroic too. Also don't forget that SV does do plenty of physical damage and isn't immune to the nerf either.

All that the ArP changes mean is that we don't have to stop using ArP trinkets right at the start of ToC because of softcap issues, and can wait till much later, and don't need to gem ArP. It's not even a nerf to how ArP works (that would be a real nerf), it's just a nerf to how much arp each point of rating gives, which just makes more room to wear ArP gear before it becomes useless. As it stands, some people were passively ArP hard capped a few weeks into ToC, which would be a sorry state of affairs for 2 tiers of content (ToC and Icecrown).

With the change, people have more flexibility in which pieces of ToC gear they wear, how to gem, and most importantly of all, in how they gear in icecrown, since they won't be juggling around the ArP hard cap for every piece of Icecrown gear.

Please stop acting like it's the end of the world - it's equivalent to increasing the amount of hit rating needed per % of hit, which wouldn't be that much of a nerf either.

It's just disappointing how oblivious Blizzard seems to be to the effort required to get a decent ArPen gear as a hunter (unlike plate DPS which is painted all over with it, I had more ArPen on my DK alt than on my hunter for a long time) as opposed to Survival where the usual "junk stat", haste, is actually pretty good up to a point, and now their attitude is "you go get that ArPen gear, boy, and maybe we'll let YOU beat Survival on some gimmick fights for a change".

But if ArPen becomes available more and more, as seems to be the trend, MM might end up dominating again. But right now it seems to me like players who made some informed gear and spec decisions, and then spent not a little effort in realizing them, got kicked in the teeth by Blizzard.

Assassin Rogues use Envenom a lot so get a low benefit from ArP compared to other Rogues.

Anway, all those classes do physical damage and most likely cannot avoid the ArP stat (it is on a lot of gear), but they aren't affected as much (loosing 10-50 dps).

Put the stats from the Best DPS sheet into the new PTR sheet to see how much of a difference ArP Marks vs SV is.

Marks - 10469.57
Surv - 10288.31

It's no longer a 500 dps gap between the two specs, even survival got slightly nerfed with the ArP change. Marks is still the highest dps spec of the three even still stacking armor pen. In full BIS, you lose ~430 dps. It will be lower, but it puts it more inline with the other classes. We really shouldn't be closing in on the 11k mark at this point, especially since other classes are just hitting the 10k mark in ToC gear.

In a hard marks rotation the que in action would go;

"Hunters mark; Srs; chimera shot; killshot; aimedshot steadyx5"
That means once you have srs and the boss is at 98% your rotation would consist of;

chimera shot; aimed shot; steady shot x5?
or steady shot x4?

I've been able to pull off 5 before with a decently high ms.
Also I don't think


Is normal. Isn't chimera shot supposed to be the most damaging shot?

Under normal circumstances you shouldnt be able to pull off a 5th steady shot without delaying your next Chimera by doing it. With an average 100-150 latency, you would usualy end up with Chimera-Aimed-4x Steady and a small wait time of approx 0.2-0.3 seconds.

As for the overall Chimera Shot damage, you want to be looking at 8-12% of your total damage done (including pet's damage) + another 6-8% from Chimera Shot Serpent damage. But in the end on a stand and shoot fight you will always end up with having most damage done by your auto shot.

If you rotation is solid, you should have Auto Shot at the top, and then followed by Steady Shot. Chimera has it's damage split into the initial damage and then the serpent sting portion. They show up as 2 individual damage sources in recount.

Depending on the level of armor penetration that you have, Aimed shot can creep above Chimera in some cases too.

This is also depending on how well you position yourself as well, if you are moving lots or it's a high movement fight, steady and auto will be a lower % of your damage because obviously you can't do these while moving where as you can still cast Aimed/Chimera.

Another thing is you don't just ....."strictly" gem for armor pen. While gemming (in my case at least), i would notice that after putting two ArP gems in, the spreadsheet would say that agi is now the strongest stat. The thing is, at first they have to grow together and then you reach that point that ArP is god-like, hahaha.

It is possible, you are gemming for ArP, without the gear to back it up (and also the thing about improved arcane shot from the guy above me)

Silencing shot is off the global cooldown; now, it's damage may be low (well, not THAT low), but if it's a free shot, you may as well bind it to one of your instants for some added damage, because we know every little bit counts. I'd suggest Aimed shot for that, because the 10 sec cooldown means you could fire it automatically every second time AS comes of cooldown. Given the rather long cooldown, the mana cost won't make a difference, because your mana either runs out like crazy anyway without JoW, or it regenerates fast enough with JoW.

Silencing Shot gives me 1-1.5% DPS, so it's nothing to sneeze at.

Dear Hunters,

Please stop responding/helping people with shitty posts that get infracted or that you know deserve to get infracted. Report them, then ignore them. If you're feeling like a Good Samaritan for some reason, help via PM. Thanks.

I would like to go back to this post for a bit. Like two days ago I decided to get the glyph instead of Glyph of the Hawk and put Aimed shot in a macro so I can cancel Abominable Might and Unleashed Rage. Since our guild's reports are private, I will just give you the numbers. This includes a full ToC 25 normal mode clear + XT hard mode, IC hard mode, Kologarn and Auriaya.

Auto shot Hits - 586 Crits - 876 (58.9%)

Steady shot Hits - 359 Crits - 543 (59.3%)

Chimera shot Hits - 115 Crits - 195 (61.3%)

Chimera-Serpent Hits - 124 Crits - 168 (56.8%)

Serpent Sting Hits - 483 Crits - 586 (54.6%)

Kill shot Hits - 31 Crits - 33 (50.8%)

Wild Quiver Hits - 67 Crits - 90 (57%)

Silencing shot Hits - 75 Crits - 98 (55.1%)

Aimed shot Hits - 50 Crits - 222 (79.9%)

My unbuffed crit before this raid was around 48.7% roughly. Since I never check my AP/Crit values in raids, I will use the spreadsheet. It suggests that with the same raid buffs I had last night I should have just under 59% crit.

Now, the question is how much of this difference is due to the glyph? To me at least it seems that it actually works. With the added 12% crit to Aimed from talents, it comes 1% short of the predicted crit %. Maybe part of this is due to RNG and part of it because I fired a number of Multi shots during the night, that I did not include in the table above, that would have been Aimed shots.

So is there anything that I am actually missing?

There is a 10% increased crit chance from your glyph. It does work. The real problem with TSA glyph is that 6% haste, at least for me, is a bigger dps upgrade than 10% crit onto aimed shot. If you are seeing an upgrade when you switch from hawk to tsa glyph, is maybe because you are neglecting your talent points. With the TSA glyph I must put in a point into TSA, taken out of something... Here are my results, from the spreadsheet:

2/3 imp steady, 1/1 TSA, TSA Glyph: 8704.54 DPS
3/3 imp steady, 0/1 TSA, Hawk glyph: 8757.13 DPS

The standard caveat applies, though; my gear just may be itemized better for the hawk glyph.